Thursday, December 13, 2012

OK folks, our PCI Compliance book has been out for a few months now, and Branden & I thought it would be fun to give away a copy with another contest! We have assembled a group of three independent judges who will look at the submissions and pick winners for each competition. The winner will receive a free, signed copy of the book! In fact, it would be one of those rare “dual-signed” copies with both of our signatures (and the book will have to travel from TX to CA – or from CA to TX – for this )

Our book attempts to draw a middle line between the black & white “audit” style of looking at PCI DSS and the loosey-goosey “anything goes” view. We want to take a compliance-friendly and security-friendly, practitioners line. However, sometimes even a compliance guy has to be CREATIVE!

So our second challenge to you, in the comments below, please tell us about your MOST CREATIVE PCI DSS CONTROL you implemented, assessed or even witnessed.

HOWEVER, it will help your submission if such control was also ACCEPTED by a QSA. We will absolutely reject the creative control submissions that have no chance of making your environment PCI DSS compliant…

You’ve got about a week (until the end of December 21st), and we will announce the winners after the holidays!

It doesn’t matter if you comment here or on Branden’s blog, we will capture all of them.

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

"Hilarious in a sad way, the worst PCI fail I ever had was gettingsolicited by a Wedding / Bridal catalog company to assist them inimproving their online ordering and bridal catalog subscriptionservice. I had no contract with them, this was just a preliminary"Let's see what we can do for you." They sent us their website, andalso e-mailed me a copy of their site's source code.In the source code was an SQL dump of over 7 years of brides personalinformation including names, addresses, birthdays, and FULL creditcard numbers, expiration dates, CCVs, card type, phone numbers, emailaddresses, and unencrypted passwords.In shock of seeing this, I called the potential client, said wecouldn't help them and deleted the data as completely as I could.Eek!"

“A very large retailer decides to reorganize their IT department to be more responsive and reactive. As part of that reorganization, they create a group titled 'Enterprise Monitoring' that is responsible for the care/feeding of the log management and analysis solutions. Centralized personnel that actually do the monitoring are pushed out to the business units where, according to IT management, the actual monitoring belongs. Everyone at the meeting announcing this decision says that the name. Enterprise Monitoring, needs to be changed because it gives the impression that the group does the monitoring, but they are over ruled.Spin ahead almost a year later to their PCI assessment. The monitoring personnel that were pushed out to the business units were, surprise/surprise, were seen as new bodies that could be used for everything BUT monitoring. So, we have great log management and analysis solutions running, but no one has been monitoring anything for almost a year! When asked, the business units point to the Enterprise Monitoring group and say that it is their responsibility because they are 'Enterprise Monitoring'. DUH!﻿” (source)

and

“I work with a stadium and arena concessions operation that once told me they were compliant because they put their card swipe readers on the counter and turned them around to face the customer. They no longer touched the cards so this made them compliant. True story.” (source)

and

“It’s a not a fail, but I certainly found humor in this. When enrolling in training with the PCI Security Standards Council, if you would like pay by credit card they ask that you write your CC#, CVV, Expiration, etc on the invoice and fax it or mail it to them. They note, it is a secure and password protected fax. I expected something a little more from the people who create the standards, but hey that’s one way to reduce your scope. Upon receiving the invoice, it was an LOL moment. ” (source)

About Me

He is a recognized security expert in the field of log management and PCI DSS compliance. He is an author of books "Security Warrior", "PCI Compliance", "Logging and Log Management" and a contributor to "Know Your Enemy II", "Information Security Management Handbook" and others. Anton has published dozens of papers on log management, correlation, data analysis, PCI DSS, security management, honeypots, etc . His blog securitywarrior.org was one of the most popular in the industry.

In addition, Anton teaches classes (including his own SANS class on log management) and presents at many security conferences across the world; he recently addressed audiences in United States, UK, Singapore, Spain, Russia and other countries. He worked on emerging security standards and served on the advisory boards of several security start-ups.

Before joining Gartner in 2011, Anton was running his own security consulting practice www.securitywarriorconsulting.com, focusing on logging and PCI DSS compliance for security vendors and Fortune 500 organizations. Dr. Anton Chuvakin was formerly a Director of PCI Compliance Solutions at Qualys. Previously, Anton worked at LogLogic as a Chief Logging Evangelist, tasked with educating the world about the importance of logging for security, compliance and operations. Before LogLogic, Anton was employed by a security vendor in a strategic product management role. Anton earned his Ph.D. degree from Stony Brook University.